The Importance of Page Titles to Small Business SEO

Importance of Page Titles

As Moz writes, “Title tags are the second most important on-page (SEO) element next to content.”

Creating quality content, is always going to be the most important aspect of a successful small business SEO program. By not putting any effort into your page titles, you are effectively limiting the number of people who can find the valuable content you are creating.

What are Website Page Titles?

Page titles are a way to tell search engines and those searching on the web, what a specific page on your website is about. For many small businesses their page titles have little or no relation to the content on the page.

An example would be a commercial real estate brokerage, which has pages with listings of their available properties. Too often I will see, a page title setup as: Pennsylvania – XYZ Real Estate Firm of ABX Town.

The issue with using a page title like this, is that it provides little semantic relationship for a search engine to tell exactly what the page is about and if a search engine has trouble extracting the meaning of a particular page, it is unlikely that that page is going to rank well for any high volume searches.

Creating Page Titles For Your Small Business Website

On May 11th, 2016 Google made a major change to the layout on their Search Results Page, and thus ended up making Page Titles of even more importance. As SEMPost notes: Google has increased the column for organic search results to about 600 pixels from 500 pixels…This also means there is a new title length! So instead of trying to work within 55-60 characters maximum, you now have 70 characters.

Should You Include Your Business In Your Page Title?

I think most small businesses should take it a step further and stop using their business name in the page title. In my opinion, search engines have evolved enough to know to associate your domain with your business. It really only makes sense to include the business name within the homepage title. Link

Video Transcription: Why Page Titles Are Important to Small Business SEO
Hi. Welcome to One Minute Marketing. Today’s tip is all about small business SEO. It’s simple, but way too often overlooked, and that is the importance of good page titles on a small business website. Page titles give you one of the first best ways to tell a search engine what explicitly that page is about. So not only are most small business websites missing the boat, too often the page titles are not even very relative to what the page is about. A great way to start taking a look at your site, and look at all the page titles at once, do a site colon, your URL search in Google, and then just start scrolling through.

See if they actually all make sense to what that page is offering, or the product available. And you want to take it a step further? Consider dropping your brand name. Google knows who you are. You need to capture the traffic, and then tell the searcher who you are. Just think about it, all right?